Last month I was honored to participate in the bi-annual SAP BTP Hackathon, a fierce and friendly 3-day competition during which teams from different organizations build a working prototype of an application using SAP BTP services. The Solace team was thrilled to partner with Hydro-Québec and collaborate with BlueBoot and SAP. Together, we tackled an exciting use case, dived into the architecture, and created a working prototype. In this article I will explain the use case and how we achieved the desired outcome using various BTP services and SAP Integration Suite, advanced event mesh.
Hydro-Québec is responsible for supplying power to all residents of Quebec (a province in Canada). Hydro-Québec’s mission is to provide clean and renewable energy which is low in greenhouse gas emission. All the energy is generated within the province and less than 1% of the electricity consumed in Québec comes from other out-of-province sources.
Due to its location, Quebec gets very cold during winter — the temperature can get as low as -25 or -30° celsius, which is around -22°F. This is the time when the energy consumption is the most since everyone uses more power to keep their homes warm.
Figure 2 – Citizen’s view on a winter day
At Hydro-Québec’s head office, the main concern is how to keep with the increased capacity demand.
Hydro-Québec’s SAP development team came up with an idea to keep energy consumption low during the winter months using SAP BTP technologies. The idea is to challenge the citizen to change the thermostat temperature to a lower value which would lead to lower energy consumption by:
Meanwhile, back at the head office, an admin portal lets Hydro-Québec managers see how much energy is saved through the program, how many people have accepted or rejected the challenge, etc.
Figure 4 – HQ Sustainability Initiative
After the initial discussion, whiteboarding, and a lot of back and forth we came up with the architecture. This architecture involved some microservices best practices such as decoupled/loosely coupled services, agility, event-driven, extensibility, and individual scalability. The final architecture used the following services from the BTP cockpit:
Figure 5 – High-level Architecture Using BTP Services
Here are brief descriptions of each of the components used:
As shown in the high-level design, various BTP components interact with AEM by publishing and subscribing to the data that is needed.
Here is what the mobile app looks like, specifically showing energy consumption details, the presentation of challenge to the client, and a display of how much they saved.
Figure 6 – Energy Consumption Details Figure; 7 – Challenge Presented to Client; Figure 8 – Amount Saved by Client
Figure 10 – Administrative View
The SAP BTP Hackathon 2023 was a huge success. We all came out learning something new as well as fostering friendships that we will cherish forever. The working prototype was demoed to the entire SAP BTP, and HyrdoQuebec team. Please contact Solace if you have any comments or questions about this use case and the Advanced Event Mesh service of SAP BTP, or if you would like to see the hackathon demo in action.
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